The Brutal Truth About Perfectionism No One Wants to Hear | Brené Brown

We think of vulnerability as a dark emotion. We think of it as the core of fear and shame and grief and disappointment, uncertainty, things that we do not want to feel, right? I call perfectionism the 20-ton shield. We carry it around thinking it's gonna protect us from being hurt. Yeah. But it protects us from being seen. But how many of you were raised in families where you were encouraged to get curious about your emotions and talk about them and explore them? Right? Versus how many of you were raised in families where you were taught, "Hey, suck it up." Yep. Push through and get it done.

Hello, Believe Nation. My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the world's major problems. So to help you on your journey today, we're gonna learn from best-selling author Brené Brown and my take on her top 10 rules of success. Rule number 1 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best. And as always, as you're watching, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below. Put quotes around it so other people can be inspired. You might win a prize as well. And also when you write it down, it's much more likely to stick for yourself as well. Enjoy!

And so my story is that I am a researcher and I never thought I would have a big public career. And so I did a TED Talk that went very viral. And in the wake of that, I was kind of everywhere for a couple of months on every CNN.com, NPR. It was everywhere and something I wasn't used to. And the marching orders from my therapist and my husband were, do not read the comments online. So I read all the comments online. And so one morning, I woke up and there were 2 or 3 new articles out and I started reading the comments. And they were devastating. They weren't about my work, they were about me, they were super personal. And they were the things that creative people play in their mind and then give up doing what they really want to do. Like if I asked every single one of you, "Would you try if you knew people would never say this about you? What would this be?" Those were the comments that morning. "Of course she embraces imperfection. What choice does she have? Look at how she looks." "I feel sorry for her kids." "Less research, more Botox." just mean personal attacks, the things that really, up until that moment, had inspired me to stay very small in my life and my career, just so I could avoid those things. So that morning, Steve and the kids leave, I stay home, I get on the couch, and I watch 8 hours of Downton Abbey. And when it's over, I don't want to turn off Downton Abbey, because the minute you turn it off, I turn off Downton Abbey, then it's like soccer practice and dinner and back to the mean people and maybe should I get Botox and maybe, you know, maybe if I stand still when I talk. So I get my laptop and I do a search for who was president in the United States during the Downton Abbey era. Have you ever done that? Like you're numbing with TV or a movie and so when it's over, you just like stay in that space by like learning more about the actors and what's going on. I've been doing this long enough to know this is like, You're laughing with me, not at me. So I put it in, and Theodore Roosevelt comes up, and a quote comes up. And I read it, and this is what it says. It's a quote from a speech that he gave in the early 1900s at the Sorbonne, and a lot of people call it the "Man in the Arena" speech. And this is the passage that changes my life. "It's not the critic who counts. It's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done it better." The credit belongs to the person who's actually in the arena, whose face is marred with blood and sweat and dust, who at the best, in the end, knows the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, he fails daring greatly. So the moment that I read that, I closed my laptop, and this is what shifted in me: 3 huge things. First, I spent the last 12 years studying vulnerability, and that quote was everything I know about vulnerability. It is not about winning, it's not about losing, it's about showing up and being seen. The second thing: this is who I want to be. I want to create. I want to make things that didn't exist before I touched them. I want to show up and be seen in my work and in my life. And if you're going to show up and be seen, there is only one guarantee, and that is you will get your ass kicked. That is the guarantee. That's the only certainty you have. If you're going to go in the arena and spend any time in there whatsoever, especially if you've committed to creating in your life, you will get your ass kicked. So you have to decide at that moment, I think for all of us, if courage is a value that we hold, this is a consequence. You can't avoid it. The third thing which really set me free, and I think Steve, my husband, would argue has made me somewhat dangerous, is kind of a new philosophy about criticism, which is this: if you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I'm not interested in your feedback. Period. That's it.

What does it mean to be a wholehearted person? You have actually, you know, a list of 10 different qualities that wholehearted people have in common. And so cultivating authenticity, letting go of what people think, that's the first one. Let's talk about that.

It's so hard. I thought doing this research, I thought going into it, there were authentic people and inauthentic people. Mm-hmm. I did not find any evidence of that at all. What I found is authenticity is a practice, and you choose it every day, sometimes every hour of every day. And it's a practice. It's not, I just wake up and, hey, I'm authentic. It's that when you walk into a meeting, you have to make the choice. Am I going to show up and let myself be seen? Am I going to raise my hand and say, wow, y'all look super excited. I don't know what in the hell you're talking about. I'm so lost. You know, that's a choice.

Yes.

Uh-huh. Right? Mm-hmm. And to be, make that authentic choice, you gotta let go of—

Of the fake-a-roo, I say.

Yeah.

I call it the fake-a-roo. But you know what? I have found, I mean, I consider myself to be an authentic person, but when I am inauthentic is when I've allowed myself to be around people who were not, and then I have to fake it to be with them.

Oh, for sure. It's contagious.

Yes.

So they're faking it. Yeah. And you know you're in that situation when you do that, "Haha," that kind of "haha." You're laughing at jokes that aren't funny. You're pretending to be comfortable when you're not and lose your own authenticity.

Yeah, and I do it. One of the most shocking findings of my work was the idea that the most compassionate people I have interviewed over the last 13 years were also the absolutely most boundaried. What do you mean by the most boundaried? So I'll give you a great definition of the— the definition of boundary that I use in the book. Boundary is simply what's okay and what's not okay. What I think we do is we don't set boundaries. We let people do things that are not okay or get away with behaviors that are not okay. Then we're just resentful and hateful. Me, I'd rather be loving and generous and very straightforward with what's okay and what's not okay. So my question is big, B-I-G. What boundaries need to be in place for me to stay in my integrity and make the most generous assumptions about you? But generosity can't exist without boundaries, and we are not comfortable setting boundaries because we care more about what people will think, and we don't want to disappoint anyone. We want everyone to like us, and boundaries are not easy. Um, But I think they're the key to self-love, and I think they're the key to treating others with loving kindness. Sustaining. Sustaining. You can't— nothing is sustainable without boundaries. What I found, you know, 12 years of research, 11,000 pieces of data, I did not interview in all that time a person who would describe themselves as joyful or describe their lives as joyous. Who did not actively practice gratitude. And for me, it was very counterintuitive because I kind of went into the research thinking that the relationship between joy and gratitude was, if you're joyful, then you should be grateful. But it wasn't that way at all. It was really that practicing gratitude invites joy into our lives. And when I say practice, I think this is this is the part that really changed my life. It changed my family and the way we live every day. When I say practice gratitude, I don't mean kind of like the attitude of gratitude or feeling grateful. I mean practicing gratitude. These folks shared in common a tangible gratitude practice. They either kept gratitude journals. Some of them did interesting things like at 1, 2, 3, 4, like at 12:34 every day, they said something something out loud that they were grateful for. One of the things that we do, like we say grace at dinner. And so now after grace, we go around and everyone in my family says something they're grateful for. I mean, and what's interesting is when we first started, I have a first grader, a first grade son, Charlie, and eighth grade daughter, Ellen. And at first I thought, and we've been doing it for a couple years now, like they're going to like, oh God, Mom. And there was a little like, are you experimenting on us? There was a little bit of that. But now what's interesting, even after we did it for like a couple of weeks, that on those crazy busy nights where we're trying to like get to soccer and piano and homework, and Steve and I are just like, we say a quick prayer, we start eating, my kids are like, whoa, what are you grateful for? And it's been extraordinary because not only absolutely does it invite more joy into our house, it also is such a soulful window into what's going on in my kids' lives. You know, so there are some days where my 8th grader will be like, "I'm joyful that there's a huge thick wall between my room and my brother's room." You know, something just very, you know, honest. But there are other days she'll say, you know, she had a friend whose mother recently died. And she said, you know, for a month she would say, "I'm just so grateful that y'all are healthy right now." You know, and so not only did it make us all more aware of what we had, and more willing to slow down and really be thankful for the joyful moments we had. But it let me know where she was emotionally in her life. You know, my son is always, you know, I'm grateful for bugs, I'm grateful for frogs. But sometimes he'll say, you know, I'm grateful that you picked me up early. Or, you know, I'm grateful that I finally understand adjectives, you know. So it's, there's a great quote that says it's not joy that makes us grateful, it's gratitude that makes us joyful. And it's by a Jesuit brother, a Jesuit priest. And I guess I was just amazed to find that bubble up so strongly in the research. It's life-changing. We think about vulnerability as a dark emotion. You know, there are a lot of people who talk about light emo— you know, positive emotions, negative emotions, dark emotions, light emotions. We think of vulnerability as a dark emotion. We think of it as the core of fear and shame and grief and disappointment, uncertainty, things that we do not wanna feel, right? Things that I don't wanna be vulnerable because that means I'm afraid, that means I'm uncertain, that means I'm at risk, I'm exposed, I'm in grief. So what we do is we armor up and we say, "I do not wanna slip into these dark emotions. I will not let myself be vulnerable." But here's what I learned from the research and certainly put into motion in my own life that was the most life-changing, is that vulnerability is the center of difficult emotion, but it's also the birthplace of every positive emotion that we need in our lives. Love, belonging, joy, empathy. How many of you would agree that we're in a serious empathy deficit in our culture today?

Oh yeah.

Totally, right? No vulnerability, no empathy. In a culture where people are afraid to be vulnerable, you can't have empathy. You know, empathy is not a default response. If you share something with me that's difficult, in order for me to be truly empathic, I have to step into what you're feeling, and that's vulnerable. So there can be no empathy without vulnerability. Why do you think, in that example that I used a while ago, Daughter comes home and says, you know, tears, "No one sat with me at lunch today. They made fun of what I was wearing. So-and-so won't talk to me. They poured my books out of my locker." And the response back is, "I told you, I bought you all those cute jeans. Why aren't you wearing those jeans?" And pull your hair back. Is that an empathic response? No, it's a shaming response. Could that shaming response be at the— could a mother who absolutely adores her child respond with that shaming response? Please say yes, don't kid yourself. I mean, come on. If you've got a— if you're a parent sitting in here, then you sure as hell know the answer to that is yes. But why? Why did that happen? Where was the access to vulnerability? Where was empathy? You can't access empathy if you're not willing to be vulnerable. So if my daughter comes home and tells that to me, guess what I have to do? I have to reactivate that sweaty-palmed 7th grader who lives inside me. And I have to go, "Oh God, that's so hard. I'm so sorry." That's happened to me. That's happened to me when I was in middle school, and it's happened to me last week. Let's talk about it. But you can't get there without vulnerability. You can't fake empathy. Innovation and creativity, born of vulnerability. This is my favorite part. I talked about this in the— I did another TED Talk this year, in Long Beach, and I told the story that during 2011, and even this year, after the big TEDxHouston talk went viral, the big calls came from Fortune 500 companies. "Oh my God, we loved your TED Talk, it was great. Please come talk to all of our senior leaders." And it's like, "OK, what do you want to talk about?" Like, we don't care, just come and talk to us, just if you could ixnay the shame and vulnerability talk. Every single conversation, barring maybe 10%. I was like, well, what do you mean? Well, we love, you know, you're funny, you have this great research, I think there's a real fit with what we do, we just, we don't really do, you know, that kind of stuff around here, so if you could not mention vulnerability and shame. So, just for fun, for grins, I would say, "Okay, so what would you like me to talk about?" Yeah, fourth quarter earnings, like, frickin' don't even balance my checkbook. Like, I'm not going to talk about that. So, what do you want me to talk about? Well, the big issue, creativity and innovation. Mm, and change, we're going through a lot of change. I'm like, "Okay, so vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation, and change, and the reason that crisis is happening is 'cause you're not talking about vulnerability." Imagine creativity and innovation without vulnerability. I'm asking you for a work product that has never been made before, that's completely innovative, I need you to be creative, and I need you to present it to a group of people who are gonna, half of them are gonna think it's stupid and not understand it. No vulnerability there. Perfectionism, what emerged for me in the data was that perfectionism is not about striving for excellence or healthy striving, which I'm for. Yeah. It's a cognitive behavioral process, a way of thinking and feeling that says this: if I look perfect, do it perfect, work perfect, and live perfect, I can avoid or minimize shame, blame, and judgment.

You know what I thought when I was reading this? I had another aha.

Aha! Ah! Two people.

This was my other aha, that perfectionism— I'd never gotten this before until I read this— that perfectionism is the ultimate fear, that the people who are walking around as perfectionists, who have to have everything so—

Yeah.

That they are ultimately afraid that the world is going to see them for who they really are. And they won't measure up.

There's no question. That's what it is for me.

That's correct, right?

That's exactly what it is. Yeah, it's fear.

'Cause it's very different than trying to be excellent and working hard and doing your best.

Yeah. Yeah, and so I call perfectionism the 20-ton shield. We carry it around thinking it's gonna protect us from being hurt. Yeah. But it protects us from being seen. Let me tell you this real story. This just happened. I spoke at HubSpot last week. Okay, 13,000 people in this Boston convention center. It's like 10 minutes before I go on, and I'm making, I look at Twitter, and this person sends this tweet out that says, why is Brené at HubSpot? Why is @BrenéBrown at HubSpot 2015? And he had just tweeted like, love Seth Godin, love Amy Schumer, all these people, but why is Brené Brown? And I'm like, oh my God, why am I at HubSpot? What am I doing here? And then I'm like, I start sweating, and it's like, anyone who's at convention centers, Ladies, you know, I'm like, oh my God, what am I doing? And I'm the opening keynote. And I'm like, and then he tweets it again. And I'm like, oh my God. And so I'm like, these are marketing people. I don't know anything. So I start Googling on my phone, marketing terms 2015. And wait, the first term that comes up is incentivize. I'm like, I've got to work the word incentivize into this keynote. I'm like, what does that mean exactly? I don't know, but I'm going to say, we're going to incentivize I'm like, "What is happening?" And I have a total crisis of confidence. Like, 'cause you know, shame drives two tapes, not good enough and who do you think you are? And like, who am I, right? Snaps, terrible. And so then all of a sudden, I'm like, who is it? 'Cause what happens when you get backed into a corner? My brain is making up this story, you don't belong here. I'm like, that story's not gonna work 'cause I'm going on in 5 seconds. I'm like, so I'm like, Okay, the best case scenario, attack, attack, attack this guy. Maybe attack him from the stage. Maybe use that as my opening. Maybe say like, John Doe asked what I'm doing here. Well, let me tell y'all, you know, and then I click on the tweet to figure out what his name is and I accidentally hit the link in his tweet and it goes to this page that says, what is Brené Brown doing at HubSpot? She's talking about vulnerability and that's so cool. So important. Here's her TED Talk. Here are her books. Could you imagine if I would have gone out there and been like, "A crate." "Dear Joy." Totally. No, and that's a true story. It just happened. Because what happens is when something hard happens and we're captured by something difficult, our emotions get the first crack at making sense of something. A bad look, a hard phone call, a disagreement at work. We think that we're rational beings. We think that cognition is going to carry us through and make sense of it, but it doesn't. You know, emotion's driving. Thought and behavior are not even in the front seat riding shotgun. They're not even in the back seat. Thought and behavior are in the trunk going, "Hey!" And emotion's driving. So the first thing we do is we tell ourselves a story that reduces ambiguity about what happened. So, "Oh, I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not good enough to be here." Men and women who have the greatest capacity for rising strong, in the moment something happens, they hack into that neurobiological process of making up a story. They stop and say, "Wait a minute, what's actually going on here? What is— what am I feeling? What do I know for sure?" 'Cause what is, you know, what is a story? There's a name in research for a story that has 1 or 2 limited data points. And we fill in the rest with fear. Wow. It's called a conspiracy. A conspiracy is a story with limited data points. So here's what I know. I know a guy sent a tweet. I know I'm getting ready to talk. That's all I know. So now that I'm ready to ruin his career and use him as a whipping person, you know, as I talk, what is going on? This first step of rising strong is recognize you've been snagged by emotion and get curious about it. That's it. But how many of you were raised in families where you were encouraged to get curious about your emotions and talk about them and explore them?

Right?

Versus how many of you were raised in families where you were taught, hey, suck it up. Yep. Push through and get it done. So the first thing is really reckoning with emotion. What am I feeling? And what do I need to know more about? That is a huge— and so that thing that you say, like, does someone know something that I don't know? Do they have information I don't have? That's a huge part of the reckoning. We just don't do it. So in that minute in the backstage when I was on my phone, I could have just said, whoa, Brené, your, like, heart is racing, your teeth are clenched, and you're going in for the kill here. What do you know about this? Yeah. Nothing. You know nothing. And what if you knew everything? Who cares? Who gives a shit? Yeah. You know, there are 13,000 people. You're gonna spend an hour targeting one guy you don't know? Shame is far more likely to cause destructive behaviors than it is to cure it. What we know is that shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, bullying. It's not helpful to be ashamed for this reason, and I think this is really a core thing that we need to get our heads and hearts around as a culture: shame corrodes the part of us that believes we can change. So to shame someone into changing is like saying to them, you are horrible and worthless and you're not capable of change, get better. I have interviewed over 600 men and women now across the country about shame. And across the interviews, men and women with high levels of resilience to shame share 4 things in common. The first is they feel physically recognize when they're in shame and they know what triggered it. So let's say something happens at work, I make a mistake or something happens, and that warm wash comes over me. You know that feeling? Yes. Yeah, we all know it. Yeah. If I can physically say, oh my God, no, this is shame, I'm in shame, it's very helpful because we are not fit for human consumption when we're in shame. We need to pull away and get regrounded, take some deep breaths, and figure out how to respond. One of the things that makes shame worse is normally when we're in it, we act out. For example, the mother that I interviewed, she fills her car up, she goes into the gas station, she goes to pay, her credit card's declined. The man shames her in front of the other patrons, makes her leave her— I think her wedding band and her wallet and leave with just an ATM card. So she's filled She gets in the car, she slams the door. When she slams the door, it wakes up her 3-year-old toddler who's in the back seat, who starts screaming. What happens next? She starts screaming back, "Shut up! Shut up!" So now she's in the shame of having this credit card declined, being belittled in front of people, and now having to deal with the, you know, the struggle of, "I'm a horrible mom, and why am I taking this out on my child?" So men and women with high levels of resilience recognize fear. Physically when they're in shame and what triggered it. [Speaker:SR] Okay. [Speaker:DG] Then they practice critical awareness. How realistic are the expectations and messages that we put on ourselves or that others put on us that tell us who we're supposed to be? The third thing is men and women with high levels of resilience reach out. We've got to share our story. [Speaker:SR] So they talk about it. [Speaker:DG] They talk about it, you know. We breathe through it, we recognize we're in it, and then we call and say, Hey Patricia, it's me. You're not gonna believe what happened. Can you listen? It's hard. And then we speak shame. You know, it's— I try to explain to people the importance of using the word shame. And this is not just lay people. This is mental health professionals. You know, we've got to use the word. It's different if I were to call you and say, oh Patricia, it's Brené, I'm so embarrassed. That would mean one thing, right? But if I were to call you and say, Patricia, it's Brené, and I'm I'm really struggling with some shame. That's different. It's a different conversation, right? Shame cannot hold on when we name it, right? So it's not just, you know, an academic pet peeve. I want everybody to get the semantics correct. Men and women with high levels of shame resilience use the word and talk about the emotion. I think there's like a thin film of terror wrapped around us. And so if it's not, I'm not safe enough, I'm not It's I'm not liked enough. I'm not promoted enough. I'm not loved enough. I don't have enough. I don't have enough.

I am not enough.

At the very bottom, I'm not enough.

Yeah. Oh, that's big, big, big, big, big, big. Somebody ring some bells. We need some bells to ring on this show. But that's it.

No, that's it. And so guess what the number one casualty is of a scarcity culture? What? Vulnerability.

We shut down.

We shut down.

Because I'm not going to let you know.

No. Because I'm already scared.

I'm not all together.

Right.

Yeah.

And the thing is that people are like, oh, well, we lose a little vulnerability. But vulnerability is not just about fear and grief and disappointment. It's the birthplace of everything we're hungry for.

Creativity?

Joy, creativity, faith, love.

Innovation and all of that. Yes.

The whole thing is there is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

So you gotta be open enough to take the risk to fail.

Yeah. What I have found in my life and what I found in my research, which fueled what I did in my life, is that the people who have the most courage, who are willing to show up and be the most vulnerable, are the ones who are very clear about about who the critics are. The ones who reserve seats for them and say, "I hear you, I get it, I know where the messaging's coming from, I'm not buying it anymore." So to get very clear, the last thing which I think is the hardest is this: one of these seats needs to be reserved for you. One of these seats needs to be reserved for me. I need— when we look up and we're putting an idea, our piece of art, our design forward, who do you think the biggest critic in the arena normally is? Yourself. And so definitely me. Like, I have I have never watched either of those TED Talks because it's not in service of the work for me. And I try to do things that are only in service of my work because what would it serve for me to watch it? I would sit there and go, "Oh my God, suck in your stomach. Oh my God, that's not what you were going to say." You know, we're so self-critical. And one of the things that I think happens, and I think this happens a lot, it happens in different professions, but I think I see it a lot with creatives, is there is an ideal of what you're supposed to be. And what a lot of us end up doing is we orphan the parts of ourselves that don't fit what that ideal is supposed to be. And what it leaves when we orphan all those parts of us is it just leaves the critic. And so reserved in this seat is this. Where we came from, how we started, our families. That's me, the oldest, of course. The lost years. The years where I was so lost and confused and hurt and disillusioned that I thought the only path to freedom was a flock of seagulls haircut. The higher the hair, the closer to God, we say in Texas. The people who love us, the moments that make us who we are, and in that chair should be this person The person who believes in what we're doing and why we're doing it, and the person who says, "Yeah, it's so scary to show up. It feels dangerous to be seen. It's terrifying. But it is not as scary, dangerous, or terrifying as getting to the end of our lives and thinking, 'What if I would have shown up?'" what would have been different.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. To cast your vote on who you want to see in the next top 10, check out the link in the description and go vote for the person that you want me to profile next. I'd also love to know which clip resonated the most with you. What lesson are you going to take from this video and immediately apply to your life or to your business somehow? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to know. To find out what you have to say. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Lucille Kate Natura. Thank you so much, Lucille, for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and posting the picture on Instagram. I really, really, really appreciate the support, and I'm so glad that you enjoyed my book. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

We numb vulnerability. When we're waiting for the call, when we're trying to think about if we're going to— you know, it was funny. I guess Wednesday, I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says, how would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable? And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses. Because I wanted to know, you know, what's out there? Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick and we're newly married. Initiating sex with my husband. Initiating sex with my wife. Being turned down. Asking someone out. Waiting for the doctor to call back. Getting laid off. Laying off people. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. And I think there's evidence, and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think that it's a huge cause. We are the most in debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is— why? The problem is, and I learned this from the research, that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, "Here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don't want to feel these." And I know that's not— I know that's not what you're thinking. Knowing laughter. I hack into your lives for a living. I know that's— ahaha, God. You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy. We numb gratitude. We numb happiness. And then we are We are miserable and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle. One of the things that I think that we need to think about is why and how we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I'm right, you're wrong, shut up. That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research, a way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. Now let me tell you, if there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me. But it doesn't work because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks, which doesn't— which just— I hope in 100 years people will look back and go, and go, "Wow!" And we perfect most dangerously our children. Let me tell you what we think about— let me think very quickly about children. They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. When you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, "Look at them, look at her, she's perfect." My job is just to keep her perfect, make sure she makes the tennis team by 5th grade and Yale by 7th grade. Our job— that's not our job. Our job is to look and say, "You know what? You're imperfect and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging." That's our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that and we'll end the problems I think that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives, we do that whether it's a bailout, an oil spill, a recall, we pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. I would say to companies, "This is not our first rodeo, people. We just need you to be authentic and real and say, 'We're sorry. We'll fix it.'" But there's another way, and I'll leave you with this. This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee, and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult; to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of kind of terror when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this as passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" Just to be able to stop and instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough," then we stop screaming and start listening. We're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves. That's all I have.